Philips CEO calls for shift to ‘servant technology’ mindset in healthcare

Speaking at ViVE, the annual health technology conference, March 26-29, he described how the many different technologies and the flood of data in healthcare are often overwhelming clinicians, doctors, nurses and other carers, contributing to their leaving the industry at a time when there’s already a shortage of carers. He urged innovators and technologists to prioritize making technology and the use of data easier, simpler and more intuitive.

“Let’s shift our thinking from technology-led to carers- and patient-led,” he said. “Let’s not think about what technology can do but what it can do for the people that use it.”

Jakobs argued that COVID-19 has permanently changed the healthcare industry and said that the industry now needs to choose how to move forward.

“We have a choice to make, and what I want to ask you is that we choose to focus our efforts and our energy on the carers and patients, that we redesign how we innovate into an open-systems mindset, that we make interoperability a standard, that we think responsibly about the data that we set free.”